1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is an improved apparatus and method for binding bunched pluralities of elongated items and securing the bunches of elongated items into individual bundles with banding material. The elongated items specifically referred to and given for example in this disclosure are asparagus shoots bunched and secured in small bundles for boxing and shipment to grocery stores.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In preparing fresh vegetables such as asparagus, celery, broccoli and the like for market, it is a common and desirable practice to bind a plurality of the vegetables together in bundles for ease of handling and protection of the produce. Such meal or family size bundles of vegetables are usually bound with wire or plastic ties or elastic bands. Non resilient ties have the disadvantage of often cutting into the soft and delicate produce, or being so loose as to not adequately bind the individual items securely in a group. Elastic bands require stretching and the individual application of the closed loop over the produce ends which necessitates a lot of manual labor. Adhesive tape has been widely used for enclosing plastic bags and packages containing produce, but has up this time not been widely used to bind the loose produce into bundles. One device which does bind a thermally adhesive tape around articles such as produce is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 4,232,498, issued to H. Uchida on Nov. 11, 1980. This device uses a continuous roll of thermally adhesive tape to bind groups of articles together. Basically, each group of articles is pressed into the center of a length of tape, followed by the tape being brought around the grouped items so that the tape defines an encircling loop. The tape is brought around the group and brought together where it is sealed onto itself on the other side of the group of articles. This procedure is time consuming in that each group of articles must be manually inserted into the taping device one at a time, and then taped and removed from the taping apparatus. This procedure requires essentially starting and stopping, or forward and then rearward movement of the items being bundled. The tape is cut with each bundle which essentially renders the system a non-continuous process.
Although many of the problems of produce bundling have been solved by prior art devices, there is yet to be provided a fast, automated or semi-automated, simple yet reliable apparatus for tightly banding groups of produce in a non-damaging manner.